Cass Hutt, bull rider, has nothing left to lose. The bulls should have killed him by now. Instead, it is his rodeo partner who has died, severing Cass's only ties to his world. With nothing and no one to hold him, Cass is lead back East by the sudden arrival of a mysterious land deed, back to Scotch River, Nova Scotia, and the sketchy boyhood memories he left to die there.

In Scotch River, Cass finds himself pulled powerfully towards the lonely, eccentric, complicated people who lay claim to him. As the mystery of the deed unfolds, fragments of disturbing memories surface, and a slowly remembered past threatens to tow him under. Always he feels the whispered warning in his bones: “Be careful what you wish for.”

In this dark and beautifully written novel, acclaimed novelist Linda Little introduces an unforgettable cast of characters bound together by the mysteries of blood and the burdens of memory. As it unveils its secrets, Scotch River deftly weaves a profoundly moving, deeply insightful story of family love in all its ardor and the heartbreaking, indelible acts performed in its name.

Chapter One

Cass Hutt could not feel the land beneath his feet. Stone-cold sober and reeling around on nothing as though his flesh speckled out into air, as though ghost legs propped him up. He pulled off his boots at night and ran his hands down his calves, feeling skin on skin, seeking to reassure himself. He rubbed his feet hard, one at a time, ran his palms back and forth over his soles. He massaged his toes until grubby black dirt and pungent boot sweat permeated his hands. He rubbed his hands together, absorbing the smell. On his bunk, he lay back perfectly still, resting on the edge of something dark and dangerous, and fell asleep with his arm draped over his eyes.

In the morning he saddled up and headed out with the others. Sometimes he tried to speak with them like he remembered speaking in years past. When chance allowed and he knew he could not be observed, he would slip off his horse and pat the ground, rub the earth between his fingers, knock on his boots. He hadn’t drunk a drop since he left Tacoma and still his feet would not touch the ground. And he feared the deadening of his flesh was spreading higher up his calves, its fingers reaching towards his knees. His will had grown heavy and unwieldy and wanted only to sleep. It wasn’t just that Lionel was gone, it was that Lionel had taken with him some untouchable, unnameable thing. At night when Cass dreamed, it was always of falling, of water and salt and emptiness.

Most of the day they spent cutting heifers, but Cass was as useless as a city kid. One of the others rode past shaking his head. “I know you got your troubles but, Christ, you’re embarrassing a good horse.”

The boss missed Cass at the corral, sent another ranch hand around with the message. The guy found him stretched out on his bunk, barefoot, forearm covering his face.

“Casper, is it? Casper Hutt?”

Fury jerked from the pit of Cass’s stomach to his Adam’s apple then fizzled, floated off into empty space. He let his arm fall, turned blank eyes to the man, who waved a postcard in the air between them.

“You got registered mail.”

“That?”

“Course not. You take this to the post office. You have to sign for it.” He handed the notice to Cass. “Hey, you sick or something?”

Cass twitched his shoulder in a move that might have passed as a shrug if he hadn’t been lying on his back. He tucked the card into his shirt pocket and buried his eyes behind his arm again, willing the fellow to disappear.

Nearly a week passed before Cass managed to prod himself into town. He got a haircut, wandered into a store and bought razor blades and socks, found the post office card in his wallet and remembered. Curiosity eluded him but at least he understood he ought to be curious, and that was something. At the Cotton Creek post office he exchanged his card for a bulky little envelope that he retreated to his truck to open. From the covering letter he read that old name, Casper Hutt, and his address at the One Bar None. He struggled to pull a few words out of the scramble that followed. Our, to, April. Address. If you, it, thank you. He would ask Lionel … no. No, he would not.

Accompanying the letter were two little bundles. One had several sheets of typing stapled inside a cover of heavy green paper. Dead, it said on the front. Was the word “dead”? Perhaps it was something left to him by Lionel. Then another bundle, four sheets of lined school paper folded together. Handwriting covered both sides of each sheet, an endless trail of ink looping across line after line in an impossible clutter of corners and curves. The paper crumpled and bruised between Cass’s rough fingers. He shifted his eyes to the typing again. The more he stared, the more the letters bent and twisted. Sold to, it said. A headache bloomed at his temple.

He drove home and stuffed the envelope into the kit bag under his bunk. Several times a day the package crossed his mind. He tried to care and couldn’t. He hauled hay to the herd. He pulled calves. And he lay on his bunk and did not care.

He was lying on his bunk when the boss, a proud old rodeo man, found him and started in on him with an awkward mixture of kindness and anger. “Do I pay you to lie in bed? It’s Coleman, for godsake! Everybody expects to see Cass Hutt, the great bull rider, in Coleman. It’s practically next door! And it’s not as though you’re doing any good around here.”

Cass clawed at the edge of his emptiness. With a great shrug of willpower he tossed his few things into his kit. It didn’t take long—Cass lived packed. With the morning light behind him and the air still brittle with the night’s chill he drove west into the hills towards the Coleman rodeo. His truck had developed a rattle under the hood that he could not be bothered to investigate. He hadn’t driven ten miles when he pulled off the road simply because he could not bear to go on. The hopelessness of the venture overwhelmed him. He no longer belonged to his life. The idea of riding a bull was as preposterous as the idea of taking flight. Or of sitting in a truck on a roadside, or of standing on a prairie trying to believe in some dead thing beyond the sky. His eyes slumped to the kit bag on the seat beside him and rested there for minutes, perhaps hours. When his eyes focused again he pulled the pack to him and rummaged for the buried documents, laid them out before him. Never mind the handwritten pages. The typed bundle he examined again. Dated October 15, 1963. A name and address. “Sold to”—he was fairly certain of these words. Perhaps the word on the cover was not “dead” but “deed.” The word “river” he recognized as well. Another name and the same town listed again. Sss. Kuh. Oh. River. Noh. He looked away before the letters could knit tangles in his head. He repeated the sounds aloud. An odd watery feeling sloshed through him, as though his joints were not attached to each other. This had nothing to do with Lionel. He pulled out his wallet and flipped through the empty cellophane windows where family photos were supposed to be kept. He tugged his birth certificate out of its sleeve. Yellow crumbs of dried plastic flaked off and fell into his lap. Carefully he placed the remnants of the card next to the address on the document. Scotch River, Nova Scotia.

Long ago Cass had worked his way out west. People always said this as though it were a social advancement, like “I worked my way up through the company.” He had left almost nothing back east. In Nova Scotia there had been … he had been … Words disintegrated. Once he had watched a man cut a bull rope in half. He no longer remembered why the man had done this, but the image haunted him, then and now—a grip, a length of plaited rope, then nothing. All that hold and nothing to hold on to. Two parts of nothing. Somewhere he must have left some frayed hank of rope a person could lash himself to.

He turned the truck around and drove back the way he had come, slowed at the turnoff to Cotton Creek. But why return when the ranch was nothing but someone else’s cattle and horses and earth that he could no longer stand on? He continued east past Lionel’s gravesite, a hole filled with bones like the grave of every other dead man. He passed the home of Lionel’s real family in Lethbridge, a huge boxful of people from someone else’s life. Cass drove until the sun blazed red in his rearview mirror and the rattle under the hood had become a roar. At Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, he pulled into a garage. He sat in his truck rubbing his shins then his feet, pressing his fingers into the boot leather. He would spin off the planet, he was certain, if he couldn’t get his feet on the ground.

He sorted through his things, chose carefully, shrugging into his heavy coat with the sheepskin lining, taking the new socks and razor blades he had ignored since the day he bought them, leaving his bull rope, gloves, rosin. He took his bedroll, his slicker, left his spurs and his watch. He sold the truck at a ludicrously low price to the Blackfoot Indian who ran the garage, pocketed the cash, tugged his knapsack off the seat and slung it over his good shoulder. He bought supplies at the general store across the road, packed matches, jerky and hard bread, tea and whisky, bought a canteen, a can opener, a groundsheet. He set out east along the train track across the Saskatchewan prairie, listening to the soles of his boots on the railroad gravel, trying to will sensation up his legs. The soles of his boots landed on every second tie.

Bro, Lionel used to call him. Short for brother. Of course it was a joke—my little brother. With Cass six foot two, broad and flat, and Lionel barely up to his shoulder, compact and quick like a bull rider ought to be; Cass with his dark eyes and silence and Lionel with his tussle of red curls and his quick friendly jabbering. “I think they’re brothers.” The ride came at him again in the wind blowing always against his face and this time he walked into the memory without hesitation or fear. Horseflesh, manure, blood and furious muscle, the taste of dust, the smell of rodeo that was his air, water and solid ground for months of every year enveloped him as though he had never smelled it before. He felt the hovering of the body, mere flesh, soft tissue, suspended over the horns of that spinning bull. He felt the space evaporate, the horn pierce the skin, a dagger thrusting upwards under the rib cage, the splash of arteries. He felt the physical surprise behind his eyes, heard the loudspeaker and the ambulance, felt the jostling of paramedics. The packed dirt of the rodeo arena pushed itself into his knees, drove itself between his fingers, billowed up his nostrils. A leaden plunger forced downwards through his rib cage then puke spewed everywhere, up his nose, dripped through his fingers. Insistent hands on his back, faces swirling in and out of his vision. Off in the background his name, and “I think they’re brothers.” When he woke in the training room Lionel was gone. Taken. And he was not.

All around him now space rolled out forever. There was no shelter from the vastness of the prairie, nor did Cass seek any. At night he simply stopped and ate and slept. In the morning he hoisted his pack and faced the sun. Somewhere beneath his feet steel rails pointed, whispering, This way. Thirty, forty, fifty miles a day. When trains, needles of direction, lumbered upon him from behind or bore down on him from miles away, he stepped aside and walked with their company for the minutes it lasted. There were gophers and, from time to time, trotting coyotes. In the spring sloughs ducks and geese landed, fed and flew off. Intermittently, falling-down wooden grain elevators grew from specks in the distance to small towns. Sometimes large new steel elevators had been constructed to take over from their wooden ancestors, sometimes not. Cass walked behind the backs of towns, filling his canteen from back-door taps, saying nothing, moving on. Saskatchewan melted into Manitoba. Wapella, Moosomin, Elkhorn, Virden. The crisp promise of April blew over and around him in the constant wind. When the sun shone, his Stetson shaded his eyes and neck. When it rained, his slicker shed the water, and when the April winds whipped up one last snow squall, the sheepskin lining in his heavy coat kept him warm.

Tracks joined tracks joined tracks as he approached the spiderweb of Winnipeg. As tracks sidled up to one another, parallel, close but never touching, he felt the man he had been walking beside him just beyond reach. A slice of this physical dislocation, the feeling that he was not attached and could fall off the planet, this was not entirely new to him. Several times a year throughout his western life a restless loneliness welled up in him, spherical and empty. Urgency, a kind of survival imperative, overcame him. When this happened he headed out for Calgary or Edmonton, or any American city if he was on the road, even Winnipeg a few times. It didn’t matter. Everywhere he found his city men.

Cass never refused money if it was offered, though it wasn’t their money he was after. It was their need, desperate and demanding, that raised him up, that fed him. They wanted him lean and raw in jeans and dusty boots. They spotted him leaning up against a bar, a bus shelter, a tree, with his Stetson in his hand. They met his eyes, hovered, looked away. When they glanced back, they were his. These men always had a place in mind. They were men who planned. They had money, expensive haircuts, clean soft hands, strong teeth, bodies rounded with success, bones well padded with luxury. They all wanted Cass in charge, to feel his muscle mount their will. They all wanted to lose themselves in him. And in those seconds of ultimate passion they loved him like a god and like a son—like salvation. They loved him to the center of his soul and down through the core of the earth, fleetingly and utterly, though of course not at all.

Many men he met only once or twice. A few were regulars. He collected all their pictures in his mind, gave them names. The one he called Puppy always loosened his tie slowly, pulling it out from his neck, letting the knot fall askew several inches from his Adam’s apple. His wrist always twisted right around when he opened his collar button, creating the little vee at his throat. The tie was navy with red cartwheels. Or green with yellow arrowheads or red flecked with chocolate. He never took it off, always left it hanging like a leash around his neck. Another one hung his jacket on the back of a chair, smoothed it down and patted it. Harris tweed, the man had said the first time, and Cass, thinking the man had introduced himself, answered with a name of his own. He remembered the rich confidence of the laugh, of the explanation, of the introduction almost, to the jacket. Harris Tweed wanted spurs and he kept a pair hanging on one of the bookshelves that filled the room from floor to ceiling, winking at Harris Tweed over the heads of serious men and guileless acquaintances. After a visit with Harris Tweed the smell of ink and paper and furniture polish sat in Cass’s nostrils for hours. The one he called Butch drove them out of the city in a four-by-four to his father’s section of wheat and crouched there naked and whimpering and begging for the lash of the belt. Butch always called him Sir and paid him so much money Cass couldn’t spend it without feeling the burden of the guilt it carried. Cass always returned to the ranch whistling.

Winnipeg swelled around him now. Cass left the tracks and headed downtown, sought out a familiar spot on Main Street, dropped his pack and leaned against a building. Perhaps this was all he needed. Perhaps this time was the same as all the others, only worse. But no. He slid to his haunches, unable to lift his head, hopeless. The feeling had been severed. He would not be able to stand over his city men with only thin air below his knees. He would not be able to look them in the eye.

Leaving the city, it was surprisingly easy to locate the track that had first brought him west. With the river behind him he left the towering buildings, the suburbs, the fields, walked on towards the sunrise, setting his feet where they had passed only once before. Nearly twenty years ago he washed up at the One Bar None all green and hungry, just a kid with more body than he knew what to do with, a soul like blocks in a sack, bits all jumbled and sharp and tumbling over each other. He carried internal radar that could spot trouble a week away, eyes in the back of his head and no idea where to look or what to do. Among men who paid out respect for competence he learned how to set his backside in a saddle, hold his spine and balance his body to read the horse beneath him. He learned how to hinge open his mind to encompass what a horse can know, how to create a new beast of horse and man together. Cass added his weight, his hands, his direction, to a creature with more strength and power and different senses than a man can own. He learned the minds of cattle and how to follow them where trucks could not go, down steep banks of sluices through the aspen and poplar to the rivers below, through deeply rolling hills of native grasses beneath the wall of mountain rising in the west. They herded cattle through space so vast it took a dam of rock as high as heaven to contain it. No other space, inside or out, could muster significance beneath this ocean of sky. That boy that had been was left behind. The man, Cass Hutt, began there.

Cass became a deft hand with a rope, and the boss, an old rodeo man, wanted to see him competing for the ranch. Cass roped calves but tried his hand at other events. His size and strength best suited him to steer wrestling, but in the end it was bull riding that won out. He towered over the other bull riders, who tended to be quick and tough and compact like Lionel, but Cass persevered and eventually excelled. When he won enough to be eligible for the professional rodeo association Lionel presented him with the completed forms. The boss hounded him to sign on the line. The official success made Cass uneasy, brought with it a sense of impending loss. Cass tucked his membership card into his wallet next to his driver’s license and his birth certificate. He left the One Bar None and moved further north. When they met up at rodeos Lionel greeted him like a brother.

After a couple of years Cass, unsure now why he had left, returned to the One Bar None, settled into a shimmering knowable space where predictability inched beyond the routine of daily chores and peeked at life itself. That winter Lionel hauled him along on the American tour. They rode the rodeo in the States, won enough money to keep them going, enough injuries to keep them smiling at the sight of the morning sun. Cass set his trophies on the bunkhouse shelf, stowed his buckles in a cardboard box under his bed. His bunk developed a Cass-shaped hollow where he slept. One day a bull would take him, the cardboard box would be sent to the dump, the story would be over. He could live with that.

But he could not live without it.

Cass walked. Towns came and went: Vivian, Elma, Rennie. On the third day out of Winnipeg he crossed into Ontario, a land of scrub and scrawny softwoods that cut up sky and ground, constricting the path ahead of him into a corridor. He bought coffee in a Styrofoam cup in Hawk Lake and sat on the curb to drink it. By Dryden he was simply too tired to go on. Rather than interrupt his progress he left the tracks and crossed to the Trans-Canada Highway, where a trucker picked him up. Cass rode in the cab of the rig, resting his legs and watching the road disappear too fast behind him.

“That’s quite the belt buckle you got there,” the trucker said.

The ride would cost him a story, he knew, so he tried to make a decent shift of the year he made the Wrangler tour finals in Las Vegas. People loved to hear about big winnings, spectacular losses, they loved a long list of injuries. They loved to hear the names of bulls—Mean Street, Hammertime, Shaken Not Stirred. Eight seconds, they loved. Not a penny’s worth of time yet all that money for it. As though the money made the ride. Cass listened to his voice telling one tale while his imagination relived another. His last ride, only last month, seemed so long ago, impossibly distant, as though it had all happened to some other man. And yet the details sat so crisp and clear with him. After Lionel’s funeral Cass had climbed back in his truck and headed south again, to Tacoma, where he had registered to ride. What else was there to do? There he watched steers being unloaded from trucks, their hooves heavy on the metal ramps. Calves swarmed in pens. He could have scissored his long legs over the pen rails and waded through their warm innocent bodies, lifted a calf into the air and stashed it here or there before it knew its pretty hooves had left the straw. He had often hoisted to his shoulders the still-slick bodies of newborn calves and carried them to safety, the weight of their fresh lives bearing snug against the back of his neck. The penned calves romped with slender delicacy. Soft hair curled at the tops of their heads. Here they would run, feel the jerk of the rope on their necks, the slam on the earth, be tied and released. For them there were no reasons.

Likewise for the bulls. Their brutal bulk shoved and kicked in the chutes, pawing and snorting and slamming. Born to perform, they danced for the crowd, then returned to their stalls and milled as docile as sheep. Cass had absorbed their smell, the bullying of their muscle against wood and metal. Their horns he knew well enough. They could splinter wood, crack bone, rip through flesh like a hand through water. He had counted on their solidity, believed in them, trusted them to make an ending for him. For fifteen years—not this ride maybe but surely the next would take him. They kept his life a fleeting thing, light enough to carry in his pocket.

Since the funeral Cass had kept a bottle always with him and he seldom felt his extremities. He had nipped a shot of rye, then another, just before his ride. One of the pickup men had sniffed and frowned but said nothing. The bull slammed against the chute and Cass tucked his long legs in like a grasshopper, holding himself above the bulk. Cass stared at his gloved hand as he made his wrap. It looked as though it belonged to someone else, as though his arm stopped at the elbow and part of someone else tied him to the bull.

Cass Hutt is six foot two. They grow ’em big in Cotton Creek, Alberta way up in Canada. This cowboy’s got himself a sack full of buckles back home, folks. And I guess he would by now cuz I got a bottle of extra-old premium bourbon at home that was corn when this fellow started to ride. In the school of hard knocks this man majors in holding on …

Cass watched the bull rope snake over, around, through the fingers and back. He pounded his grip into place, the leather of glove melding into the hide beneath it. He pulled breath into his lungs, down through the bull and out those mighty black nostrils snorting up terrified eddies of dust. The bull clanged the bars just below his boot. Foreign arms steadied him. He felt his head nod the signal, the chute gate flew open. All on its own his body remembered the bull, bent to him, crouched and stretched, gripping, reading the pump of the muscle beneath him, on and on, the full eight seconds to the buzzer. Then run like hell. His legs picked him up and delivered him over the boards. A foggy distance, perhaps the distance of several slugs of rye, hazed the atmosphere around him and he had to be prodded at the end, made to understand that he had won the day money—to understand that he would not be taken, now or ever. Not if he rode for another twenty years. Abandoned. He wandered out to the stage to collect his check, slept in his truck, a bottle in hand and another beneath the seat.

At the next go-round they told him he couldn’t ride—in no condition, they said. He couldn’t argue with that. He climbed back into his truck and headed north, back to the One Bar None for spring calving. But even when he set the bottle aside and turned his head to his work it was no use at all. What is lost is lost.

When the trucker stopped at a diner Cass fumbled to the bottom of his pack for the Scotch River document, slid it across the table, his eyes fixed on the glass silo-shaped sugar dispenser, his voice low with shame. “I figured out some of this but I read better if, you know, if someone tells me what it says.”

“It’s the deed to a piece of property,” the trucker said. “In Nova Scotia.” Cass listened to the trucker read the entire deed word for word while they waited for their steaks and fries.

Cass left the trucker at Marathon, Ontario, reverted to the railway tracks and walked, his feet yawning beneath him, east and south. For a week he walked through desolate, scraggy land, followed a thin line of towns that had been sparse enough twenty years ago and were sparser now. Missanabie, Chapleau, Pogamasing. Then Sudbury where he had passed a dirty winter so long ago, and then North Bay. Trees and more trees everywhere blocked his view. They grew tall here, huge hardwoods with spreading limbs and leaves as big as footprints. Another day’s walk took him to Mattawa where he followed the Ottawa Valley down through Pembroke and Arnprior. He kept the river, broad and magnificent, swollen with springtime, on his left. There were so many people now. The ruckus and confusion of Ottawa city rose and fell around him as he walked on. When a car stopped for him outside Vankleek Hill he accepted a ride into Montreal. The driver spoke French at first, then a heavily accented English. It had been twenty years since this language had startled Cass’s ears. Cass answered the man’s questions. “Heading down east. On the train tracks,” he said.

“Ah, le train. I go to Montréal right now. Good, eh? At Place Ville-Marie. I take you dare, okay?”

Once in the city, Cass hovered by the station watching hordes of delicate people in pretty shoes and clean breezy jackets. Exhaustion overtook him and he stepped into the current of people, carried along at the edge of the flow. He emptied his pockets at the Via Rail counter. “East,” he said.

He let the train carry him through the night, swaying, rocking, as far as his money would take him. He stretched out his legs and slept, his head lolling against the window glass. In the black before dawn a conductor roused him. “Thirty minutes, sir.”

From Matapédia on the Gaspé Peninsula he continued on foot, following the railway tracks south and east, down through New Brunswick. He seldom paused in the towns or villages. When nights were clear and starry he slept in the spruce and fir woods that lined much of the route. If rain threatened he kept an eye out for an abandoned barn or old shed with its back to the track. The humidity in the ocean air often made his shoulder ache, carried the faint taste of salt to his lips. From time to time the trees parted and the land opened up before him. Time shifted with space, jumbled up as though it were a bedroll once spread out wide and open on the prairie, now bunched and bundled, folded back over itself into a space too small to contain it. The ludicrous smallness of everything, the miniature clearings, all the spaces hemmed in, chopped up, shaded with trees, could hide a boy behind a bush, in a gully, by an old barn. His memory, small and fuzzy and deliberately left to die in the back of his head, shook itself, bristling like a porcupine. He removed his hat and rubbed the back of his skull. Everywhere he was threatened with a glimpse of the self he had abandoned. The thin green corridor drew him along, offering the false certainty of a single path, as though the railbed itself had decided there was to be a destination, that leaving must be reshaped into arriving, that a journey must have two ends.

By the Nova Scotia border, near Amherst, he left the tracks for the empty railbed. Twenty years ago there had been steel rails and freight trains, and ties that spaced his stride on his way west. There had been a cabin by here where he had hidden through a long night. Yes, the remnants of the shack still stood. He jimmied open the door, curled into a corner and slept. The next morning he ate the last of his provisions and pushed on. He walked through the day and most of the night, into the dawn, felt the sun warm the air around him. His canteen needed replenishing. The trees opened up where the railbed met the road at Randal’s Crossing, three miles outside Scotch River. The white barn with the green star painted on the gable end stood as a landmark. Unchanged. Time swirled inside him, his knees quaking from exhaustion. Tall and broad across the shoulders, a wide but shallow rib cage, so when underfed he flattened out like he had been run over by a cartoon steamroller. Big, but just a boy hiding, waiting for his sixteenth birthday. He wasn’t free and clear until eighteen, but at sixteen he had a chance. With no more truant officers there wasn’t much they could do to him if he didn’t break the law. Hitchhiking north from Dartmouth with a hunger in his belly and fifty bucks in his wallet. And a plastic birth certificate card. Born: Scotch River, Nova Scotia. Lying low and waiting for his October birthday.

Cass continued past the Crossing, the trees closing him in again.

"Little’s literary landscapes are the most small towns and lives or rural Nova Scotians."
—The Daily News

"Little’s sentences are declarative, short, and emotionally right to the point."
—The Daily News

"Reading Scotch River is sort of like a stylized blend of Cormack McCarthy and Annie Proulx, with a little Gordon Lightfoot thrown in..."
—The Daily News

"...a mythical journey..."
—The Daily News

"...tells a story that could happen nearly anywhere, lending Linda Little’s second novel universal appeal."
"Little’s metaphor for his lack of roots winds its way through the book and she handles it with quiet mastery."
—Fast Forward Weekly